LOCK, A.; SHOTTER, J. The social nature of human development.

Prévia do material em texto

The Social Nature of Human 
Development
ANDY LOCK* AND JOHN SHOTTER**
*University of Massey, New Zealand; **University of New Hampshire, USA
INTRODUCTION
What might one expect the contents of a chapter on early social development to 
be? Likely candidates would be the literatures on how communicative abilities are 
elaborated; how different factors such as post-natal depression can affect this pro-
cess; whether mothers and fathers act the same way towards their children, and 
what consequences any differences between them might have (and what we can 
conclude about the relative merits of single parenthood, or working mothers, or 
preschool environments on a child’s development); whether these fi ndings can be 
generalised across social groups within and across cultures; and so on. We might 
expect to be treated to an accessible review of how the social world affects human 
development. This chapter is not organised around these seemingly reasonable 
expectations. 
C H A P T E R O U T L I N E 
INTRODUCTION 1
WHAT BABIES’ MINDS GROW UP INSIDE OF: A 
SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO HUMAN 
DEVELOPMENT 3
WHAT IS AN INFANT? 6
DIFFERENT TYPES OF BACKGROUNDS 10
VYGOTSKY ON THE SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF 
ATTENTIONAL SKILL 12
SIGNS, SYMBOLS, INTERACTIONS AND SKILLS 16
THE DEVELOPMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF 
ATTENTION BY CULTURE 20
CONCLUSIONS 24
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2 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
These expectations are, we believe, based in an inadequate traditional view in psy-
chology of both ‘human nature’ and the developmental processes that are involved 
in the wonderful transformation of very dependent neonates into remarkable, inde-
pendent toddlers over a short period of time. There are, to begin with, two ways 
in which we see the traditional view as inadequate. First, it gives a primacy to each 
infant as a disembodied individual who has a biologically based trajectory of develop-
ment, some kind of internal blueprint that unfolds in a regular way over time. The 
social world ‘outside’ this developing bundle of inevitability thus comes to be implic-
itly thought of as an arena that impinges, as a set of variables, upon an individual’s 
developmental trajectory. Thus, we might attempt to isolate ‘affect’ as a variable to be 
manipulated in an experiment, and ask about the differences that can be demonstrated 
when we adopt a sophisticated experimental design that asks how infants perform 
tasks differently when confronted with happy versus neutral adults (e.g. Forbes et al., 
2004). Or we might ask how different components of the child’s world affect their 
mastery of cognitive skills (e.g. Kagan, 1976; Hofer et al., 2008). Human psychologi-
cal development, in this view, is something that happens inside the infant and child – 
after all, what psychologists are interested in are abilities that must be underwritten 
by a brain, and that is clearly located inside each individual’s head. On this basis, and 
quite reasonably so, what we might ask about is conceptually set up in a two-fold way. 
First, how do ‘things’ outside the individual impinge on this development – what 
social and environmental variables are important? Second, and conversely, how 
do variations within individuals impinge on the normal course of psychological 
 development? What, for example, are the effects of drugs such as thalidomide and 
genetic disorders such as those underwriting Williams syndrome and the autistic 
spectrum disorders? It is not our intention here to trivialise the fi ndings that work 
conducted in this seemingly reasonable way have established. Rather, we want to 
consider social development from a different standpoint.
The second point where we diverge from the traditional view is that it leaves 
out that humans, young and old, live in – experience – a perceptual and subjective 
world. The problem here is, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel (Nagel, 1974, p. 435–6) 
pointed out:
The subjective character of experience . . . is not captured by any of the familiar, recently 
devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with 
its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, 
or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved 
like people though they experienced nothing. . . . If the analysis leaves something out, the 
problem will be falsely posed.
The way in which the traditional view poses the problem of development is, in 
our view, incorrect, because, in leaving out an individual’s experience, and adopting 
the computer metaphor as its explanatory framework, it ends up with an account 
of human development which misses its central character: the relation between 
‘brain events’ caused by events in our surroundings and our own living responses to 
such events, their particular mattering to us, their meaning for us as the unique persons 
we are among all the others around us. 
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 3
Our view is that the social world is not a variable that impinges on an individually-
based process of human psychological development in which knowledge is acquired 
in, and by, a disembodied mind through its contact with the world. Rather, human 
psychological development is inherently social, and is a process that structures the fi eld of 
experience we all have from the outset so as we can share in the ways of life of those who 
nurture us towards possessing individual skills. This fi eld of experience, what we sense, 
what we are attuned to, has a massive evolutionary history behind it, and is in no way 
a blank state. It, remarkably – and perhaps uniquely in the animal kingdom – is a form 
of experience that takes the existence of other people into account almost from birth: 
thus, it is not just a subjective experience, but an inherently intersubjective one. Put 
simply, rather than taking the social realm as affecting development, we see it as the 
constructive engine of human development. What we explore in this chapter are the 
conceptual resources that developmental psychologists need to embark on empirical 
studies that will enable a more adequate account of human development.
WHAT BABIES’ MINDS GROW UP INSIDE 
OF: A SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL APPROACH 
TO HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I fi nd mysterious and am not able to express) is the 
background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.
 (Wittgenstein, 1980, p. 16)
Despite the interest in social affects that prevails in the social sciences, and despite the 
extensive concern that clinical psychiatry pays them, surprisingly little has been written 
on the socially structured conditions for their production. The role that a background of 
common understandings plays in their production, control, and recognition is, however, 
almost terra incognita. This lack of attention from experimental investigators is . . . 
remarkable.
(Garfi nkel, 1967, p. 49).
All animals from the simplest to the most complex, are fi tted into their unique worlds with 
equal completeness. A simple world corresponds to a simple animal, a well-articulated 
world to a complex one.
(von Uexküll, 1957, p. 10)
One primary concern in this chapter is with the nature of the social ‘background’ 
activities inside of which our babies grow up to be ‘one of us’, and how it works to 
enable development. It is this background that we feel has been and still is ignored in 
much research in developmental psychology. We are not the fi rst to have this concern, 
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4 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTALPSYCHOLOGY
as the above quotations show. But as Wittgenstein points out, this ‘background’ is 
something that has proved very diffi cult to get a handle on. To do this requires a dif-
ferent set of conceptual tools than the traditional ones psychology provides. The con-
cepts we need are relational ones, concerned with the interaction between, well. . . , 
what, exactly? We immediately face some diffi culties. Nearly all the ways we have of 
thinking about development to date are not really appropriate for the task, because 
they are non-relational ideas. Before introducing the requisite relational view (which 
we derive from the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (Merleau-Ponty, 
1968; see also Wynn, 1997) concept of chiasmic intertwining), we start from some 
familiar ground. First, we sketch some basic premises to get an initial glimpse of 
this ‘background’ that we are taking to be so important for human development. We 
then go on to fl ush out the inherently social character of how human development is 
constructed between intersubjective awarenesses (adult and infant) that cooperate in 
relation to each other within a shared material reality.
Later in this chapter, we are going to need to rethink the nature of ‘knowledge’. 
However, at birth, all human infants bring ‘something’ with them into the world. 
Traditionally, the idea of ‘innate knowledge’ would be applied to this ‘something’. 
We are thinking of this innate knowledge not as some abstract set of propositions 
somehow coded into a disembodied psychological organ (e.g. Chomsky, 1979, 2002) 
such as a mind, but as a set of unarticulated presuppositions that direct our experienc-
ing sensitivity to the world. These presuppositions guide all animals’ experiences, but 
they differ across the range of species. Dealing with them in other species is some-
thing that vets confront everyday: animals do not ‘appreciate’ that vets are trying to 
help them, but activate a whole set of anti-invasive behaviours to ward of what is 
perceived and treated as a threat. Thus, vets needs to develop a ‘bedside manner’ that 
enables them to establish some rapport with their patients, so as to establish a joint 
performance of ‘tenderness’. They have to take into account ‘the nature of the beast’ 
and foster some level of trust, or anaesthetise it.
Human infants and their caretakers also must jointly negotiate such interactions. 
Caretakers establish situations in which tenderness can be accomplished, while 
infants quite quickly come to display their appreciation of their caretakers’ altruistic 
intentions. Thus, human infants come to live in a world as they experience it, without 
thinking, and in which they ‘presuppose’ the intentionality of their own and others’ 
well-intentioned agency. They have an inherently articulated irritability that takes 
other’s intentions into account. At the same time, the intentions of those they inter-
act with have a historically elaborated structure. How humans care for each other, 
and the values they – generally unawares – intend in their interactions with their 
babies and children have been worked out over generations. But these interactions 
have a general quality that makes them ‘intelligible’ to infants in the course of their 
interactive conduct. It is here, in performed interactions, that this mysterious ‘back-
ground’ exists, emerging from what babies bring to their shared experience of the 
way adults deal with them. It is pregnant with what each participant brings, but only 
actualised and made real in the experience that is created between them.
What seems to be central to this background is that we, who are participants within 
it, come to develop, spontaneously and unconsciously, a whole range of embodied 
anticipations as to what, in an ongoing activity, should come next. In other words, as 
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 5
we will explore in more detail below, there is something very special about our liv-
ing activities not manifested in dead, mechanical assemblages of inorganic matter: 
First, we cannot avoid being responsive both to those around us [others] and to other 
aspects [othernesses] of our surroundings. Thus, in such spontaneously responsive 
spheres of activity, one person does not fi rst act individually and independently of 
another, nor does the second reply by acting individually and independently of the 
fi rst. Instead, we act jointly, in a reciprocally responsive way as a collective-we. And we 
do this bodily, in a ‘living’, spontaneously responsive way without our having to fi rst 
‘work out’ how to respond to each other. This means that when someone acts, their 
activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity – for a person’s acts are 
always partly ‘shaped’ by the acts of the others actually or implictly around them – 
and this is where all the strangeness of the dialogical begins (Bakhtin, 1986; Shotter, 
1980, 1984, 1993a and 1993b).
We can note, then, that not only do all living entities manifest a kind of developmental 
continuity in the unfolding of their activities, but they also all imply their surround-
ings, so to speak. That is, in their very nature, they come into existence ready to grow 
into their own appropriate environment, or Umwelt, as von Uexküll (1934/1957) calls 
it. There is a distinctive ‘inner dynamic’ intrinsic to the activities of living beings, such 
that the earlier phases of their activity are indicative of at least, the style of what is to 
come later. Thus, humans can respond to activities in an anticipatory fashion. And this 
possibility can work both ways: babies can come to anticipate how their parents will 
respond to them, while parents can come to anticipate their babies’ ways of acting.
In contrast to the idea that all our understandings arise from inner mental represen-
tations of outer events, the anticipatory tendencies aroused by lived activity are the 
foundation of meaning. For instance, Bakhtin (1986) suggests that the meaning of our 
expressions, of our utterances, gestures, facial expressions, etc., can be seen at work 
in the tendencies they arouse in others to respond to them in some way: ‘All real and 
integral understanding’, Bakhtin says, ‘is actively responsive, and constitutes nothing 
other than the initial preparatory stage of a response (in whatever form it may be 
actualized)’ (p. 69). Two aspects are of special importance here. One is the fact that 
such spontaneously responsive activities are so intertwined that no single individual 
can be accounted as their ‘author’. Second is the fact that a ‘something’ – a unique ‘it’ 
with its own qualitative character – is created amongst all involved in the interaction. 
As Bakhtin puts it: ‘An utterance is never just a refl ection or an expression of some-
thing already existing and outside it that is given and fi nal. It always creates something 
that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable . . . What is given 
is completely transformed in what is created’ (Bakhtin, 1986, pp. 119–120). As such, 
‘it’ has the character of what Garfi nkel (1967, p. 9) termed, an event occurring or 
happening ‘for ‘‘another fi rst time’’’.
The approach we are aiming to adopt here is thus a rather unusual one. Scientifi c 
approaches are usually aimed at providing causal explanations of observed phenom-
ena. In other words, they are aimed at providing ways of thinking and talking about the 
relevant phenomena as a preliminary to planning an intervention of some kind. Our 
aim is different. It is to do with our becoming orientated towards noticing previously 
unnoticed phenomena that happen to infl uence the development of our children, events 
that affect their development without anyone in particular intendingthe infl uence in 
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6 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
question. Our concern, then, is not with ways of thinking, but with ways of looking, 
listening, touching, and feeling that can work to render us sensitive to these just hap-
pening infl uences. Gibson (1979), an exponent of an ecological approach to psychol-
ogy inquiry, puts it thus: ‘The state of a perceptual system is altered when it is attuned 
to information of a certain sort. The system has become sensitized. Differences are 
noticed that were previously not noticed. Features become distinctive that were for-
merly vague’ (p. 254), and when this happens we come to see the meanings – what 
events occurring in a particular situation ‘point towards’ or imply – in a different light. 
Thus, we are concerned with perception, not cognition.
We situate child development within a larger context and suggest that development 
occurs within a social ecology of intricately related inter-dependencies, such that the 
occurrence of an event intrinsically implies its relations to other possible events. These 
premises move us right away from the kind of approach which orientates us towards 
a simple focus on what occurs solely within the mind of the individual child. Instead, 
we become more orientated towards descriptions and meanings, and less orientated 
towards theories and explanations. This is why we remark that the approach we are 
adopting here is a rather unusual one.
WHAT IS AN INFANT?
Infants are not ‘things’: they are processes of human immaturity in an experiencing, 
developmental limbo. Consider the images shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2
First, and obviously, these are ‘still photographs’, abstractions out of a continu-
ous process of activity: something was happening before this particular moment was 
frozen, and something will happen immediately afterwards. If these were stills from 
a movie, then each image on the fi lm would 
be slightly discontinuous from the last. In 
real life, however, there is no discontinuity. 
Second, we can assume that these photos 
depict spontaneous reactions to some par-
ticular event that the infant’s attention has 
been engaged by. This event is most likely 
either being felt, tactilely as a bodily sensa-
tion, at the interface between the infant’s 
body and the world – touch or temperature, 
maybe smell; or perceived beyond that, by 
the infant’s non-tactile, distal senses. Third, 
we can assume a caretaker is engaged with 
these spontaneous reactions. What happens 
next, as well as previously, between the care-
taker, the infant, and the world they are par-
taking in, has a quality over-and-above what 
we are experiencing as disengaged observers FIGURE 7.1
AQ1
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 7
of these photos. We can also anticipate that 
the unfolding of the interaction from each 
of these situations will be different. Further, 
at least two factors are coming into play to 
make this so: the fi rst is the different expe-
riential states these infants are in, and the 
second, the caretaker’s consequently differ-
ent intentions as to what might come next. 
In most cases, one would act to terminate 
whatever is going on for the fi rst infant, but, 
in contrast, would develop an interaction 
around what is engaging the second. In addi-
tion, we do not need to invoke a concept of 
‘knowledge’ as an internal representational 
theory here, one that we refer to so as to 
know what to do next: there is a spontane-
ous set of anticipations that project them-
selves into our ongoing, lived interaction 
that act to structure it.
Finally, let us point out that, if you have agreed, or disagreed, with what we have 
assumed here, then in so doing, you have drawn on a whole background set of implicit 
understandings that we almost all share due to the embodied understandings we have 
developed in our past exchanges with young and other human beings. Indeed, we 
want to go so far as to say that without this prior, embodied background experience 
of shared spontaneous responses to events happening around us, we would not be 
able to understand any of the events happening around us in ways intelligible to oth-
ers in our social group – we would be unable to say what it is that is happening to us, 
or before our eyes.
This poses the task of being a competent developmental psychologist in a differ-
ent light from the traditional one. A traditional scientifi c investigator of develop-
mental phenomena is supposed to be in the position of a detached external observer 
of them, rather than being an engaged participant within them, in the way that a 
caretaker is. A caretaker must act in the moment to respond to an infant’s expression 
in a meaningful way. As Murray and Trevarthen (1985; see also Tronick et al., 1978) 
showed, if the timing of such responses is delayed by only a few milliseconds, the 
infant becomes very disturbed. The point we want to make is that the developing 
child is always already orientated towards expecting a response to its expressions. 
Consequently, the process we want to understand occurs in the actual, face-to-face 
interactions of two spontaneously engaged and embodied subjectivities – usually 
caretaker and infant. The essential quality of the lived, situated, moment-by-moment 
unfolding process of development is lost when we stand back from it and aim to 
develop a theory about what is going on. Because, in fact, theories are not about 
‘what is going on, as it happens’, but are retrospective accounts of what has already 
happened.
An additional issue here relates to what might be called ‘agent’s knowledge’ 
(Taylor, 1995, p. 10). Sir Isaiah Berlin (1976) puts the central point succinctly: ‘I know 
FIGURE 7.2
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8 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
what it is to look like a tree, but I cannot know what it is to be a tree. But I do know 
what it is like to be a mind, because I possess one, and create with it’ (p. 25).1
Without this kind of agent’s knowledge we would be incapable of identifying, 
within the whole swirl of unorganised data occurring continually around us, what 
was taking place. Further, dealing with the unique and qualitatively distinct situa-
tion we are currently inhabiting would fall into incoherency. But what is this kind of 
‘knowledge’ like?
We are approaching ‘knowledge’ as a relational concept having to do with describ-
ing how an organism, human or organic, is structured to act in its Umwelt. That is, 
what an organism knows is not situated internally within its nervous system as some-
thing that can be used to explain its actions – an explanation needs something else 
to ground it. The sort of knowledge we are referring to here is a description of the 
relationship between an organism’s internal systems and its external environment. 
Looked at this way, we arrive at a different notion of what we describe as ‘ knowledge’. 
Plotkin (1993, p. xiv) has put this point, in an evolutionary context, thus:
Adaptations are themselves knowledge, themselves forms of ‘incorporation’ of the world 
into the structure and organization of living things: . . . the relationship of fi t between parts 
of the organization of an organism, its limb structure, for instance, and some feature or 
features of the world in which it lives, such as terrain or medium through which it must 
move, is one in which that organization is in-formed by the environment.
Plotkin is adopting a position here within an approach termed ‘evolutionary epis-
temology’ (as largely outlined by Campbell, 1974): that is, how knowledge, in this 
new sensewe are giving it, is constructed through time. This is a useful perspective 
to us as developmental psychologists, because we are interested in how infants (and 
people in general), change the ways in which they relate to their environments over 
time. It is the temporal dimension that is important here, because clearly, evolution-
ary and developmental processes that construct knowledge over time have different 
bases. Thus, the actual ways by which these two processes actually accomplish the 
construction of knowledge in this new sense are quite different. Two evolutionary 
examples can clarify this epistemological perspective, so as to then draw from them a 
conceptualisation of development.
All kinds of fl ying insects get into human homes. Most of them will never get out, 
but will die there. Their bodies do not distribute themselves randomly inside a house: 
most will end up on the windowsills. From the perspective of evolutionary episte-
mology this is because their perceptual systems have been constructed in a natural 
world in which solid objects are not transparent. This principle, that the presence of 
a complete spectrum of detectable light affords unobstructed movement through the 
environment, is effectively incorporated, to use Plotkin’s term, into the structural 
1 In fact, we think the situation is more complex than Sir Isaiah’s formulation of it. We would say he interprets 
what he experiences as a living person ‘from the inside’ through the concept of ‘mind’ that he draws from his 
cultural milieu. The ‘mind’ is a cultural way of conceptualising what it is like to be a person ‘from the inside’, 
not a natural, unproblematic category.
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 9
and functional characteristics of their nervous control systems. They do not have the 
wherewithal, the necessary processing capacity, to override this incorporated princi-
ple when confronted with a pane of glass. Hence, when confronted with a situation 
that runs counter to the logical structure of their relationship with how reality is for 
them, they are unable to override this structural imperative, and make a detour. They 
are effectively blind to the implications of glass (as is also the case for young infants as 
shown in the classical visual-cliff situation).
A second example is that there is a major difference between nonhuman primates 
and humans, in that the former appear to be ‘mind-blind’. That is, as Tomasello (1999, 
p. 21) has pointed out:
Nonhuman primates see a conspecifi c moving toward food and may infer, based on past 
experience, what is likely to happen next, and they may even use intelligent and insightful 
social strategies to affect what happens next. But human beings see something different. 
They see a conspecifi c as trying to obtain the food as a goal, and they can attempt to affect 
this and other intentional and mental states, not just behavior.
Now, if we take it that nonhuman primates do have what can be described as 
intentional and mental states, then the existence of these mental states in others of 
their conspecifi cs is not something that either in-forms their experience or explicitly 
guides their acting: they are effectively blind to a property of their world, something 
that is not rendered into the world that they live and act in. In this way, evolution can 
be seen as a process whereby the structure of the world, its implications, are gradu-
ally incorporated into the explicit structure of an organism and thereby inform its 
lived in world – its Umwelt – as has occurred in the case of humans, but not nonhu-
man primates.
This notion of an animal’s Umwelt comes, as we have already noted, from the 
work of von Uexküll (1934/1957). As he sees it, an animal’s environment is defi ned 
in relation to its sensory capabilities. One animal he discusses is a tick. Ticks are very 
simple animals, and they live in a sequential set of very simple environments. First, 
adult ticks hang in trees in a kind of suspended animation until they detect the smell 
of butyric acid, a component of animal sweat. Now, it is not the case that the tick 
detects all kinds of smells and has to make a decision as to whether what is coming 
in at any point in time is or is not the signature of butyric acid: the only odour signa-
ture they can detect is that of butyric acid. When this odour is detected, they fall off 
their branch, and the butyric acid detector switches off and activates a tactile sensor. 
Once the tick lands on something (hopefully an animal), the tactile sensor initiates 
locomotion. They then run around until they detect a certain level of heat, which 
acts to switch off their running-around activity and switch on burrowing-activity. And 
thus a blood supply is secured that enables the tick to accomplish reproduction. No 
brain; no learning; and a very simple ‘experience’ of the world (if any, at this level of 
organisation).
The situation is more complicated for higher order animals, because they have 
much more elaborated ways of sensing and experiencing the world from their 
evolved perspectives. But von Uexküll’s conceptualisation is still useful here. Higher 
order animals, including us, have rich lived-in worlds and rich lives. Neither sit around 
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10 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
in quasi-vegetative states waiting to detect very circumscribed nuggets of relevance 
that are prestructured for them. They are always engaged in spontaneously doing 
something. In the course of doing, there are decisions to be made about the rich 
opportunities for them in their immediate circumstances. This is the situation that 
classical cognitive psychology is interested in: how are these decisions made?
One of von Uexküll’s insights enables us to get away from the classical cognitive 
answer that there is this huge amount of internal information processing of repre-
sentations of the world going on inside the central nervous system underwriting this 
decision-making process. His insight resonates with more recent ideas about ‘exter-
nalising’ components of cognitive activity. The philosopher, Andy Clark (1997), puts 
it this way: ‘we use our intelligence to structure our environment so that we can 
succeed with less intelligence. Our brains make the world smart so that we can be 
dumb in peace’ (p. 180). Von Uexküll’s way of saying this was: ‘Every action . . . that 
consists of perception and operation imprints its meaning on the meaningless object 
and thereby makes it into a subject-related meaning-carrier in the respective Umwelt 
(subjective universe)’ (von Uexküll, 1982 [1940], p.31).
For humans, we need to add a twist to this, adding that actions are not just those 
essayed by individuals, but our actions are embedded in cultural practices. Cultural 
practices organise our perceiving of the world, and consequently imbue the objects 
and activities we encounter in it with particular meanings, over and above the natural 
signifi cances von Uexküll discusses, as to how to carry on. Cultural insights into, and 
awareness of, the meanings of these practices is provided by the symbolic resources 
of a culture, and without certain resources, many of these meanings can escape us. 
But a lack of awareness of these cultural practices and the meanings they sustain 
does not mean they are not there, underwriting our activities, any more than a bird’s 
ignorance of Bernoulli’s principle prevents it from fl ying.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF BACKGROUNDS 
The reasons why people go about things in the way they do may be quite opaque 
to them, and this opaqueness comes in a number of different varieties. First, there 
is the variety we have discussedabove, where perception guides an animal’s activi-
ties by providing it an in-formed Umwelt that has been structured by its past his-
tory. Umwelts guide actions, in the sense of providing structured anticipations as to 
‘what to do next’. Thus we fi nd infants, for example, have fi nely tuned anticipations 
as to how social interaction ‘ought’ to go, and, as Trevarthen and his colleagues have 
shown, they become distressed by very small perturbations of their expectancies. 
There is a structure of interpersonal feeling and rhythm that tunes their animated 
bodies to the activities of others in ways that are given to them at birth. These pro-
vide a basis late in their fi rst year of life for them to coordinate their interactions with 
others along with a joint interest in objects and events. Attention becomes shared, 
and in-forms their actions with others, and, in our view, this does not require them 
to have a theory guiding their actions. Symbols become constructed in these interac-
tions as useful ways of coordinating actions and objects in attention. Symbol systems 
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 11
bring their own backgrounds with them, leading to quite different language games, 
or cultural views, and ways of going on.
Some of these ‘language games’ can be seemingly quite arbitrary, with their back-
grounds existing unnoticed, but with their own momentum. For example, one might 
assume that the dimensions of the booster rockets that launch the space shuttle have 
a scientifi cally calculated reasoning behind them. It appears, though, that their diam-
eters are determined by their being built on the west coast of America and the conse-
quent need to be transported by rail to the east coast for launching. Their diameter is 
thus determined by the size of the tunnels on the American rail system. Tunnel size is 
determined by the width of the rails the trains run on. This width was inherited from 
the United Kingdom railways, because that is where rail technology fi rst arose in the 
early 1800s. Rail width in the United Kingdom stemmed from the cultural practices of 
the craftsmen who built mail coaches to an axle size that was established following the 
Roman colonisation of Britain. The Romans had chariots and carts that put ruts in the 
roads that set the size of axle widths for subsequent generations. Roman chariot axle 
widths were set as they were because they were pulled by two horses, side-by-side, and 
that was the best width to make them stable. In the same way that such an explanation 
for a present-day practice both eludes us yet rests on a background of history, so to 
do the everyday activities that background and sustain our interactions and thinking.
For example, Reader (1988) provides a set of case studies of 12 cultural groups 
and describes the ways in which their behaviours and beliefs are adapted to their 
environments. These include rice growers in Bali, slash and burn farmers of New 
Guinea, alpine pastoralists in the Swiss Alps, potato growers in the Andes, and hunter- 
gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, amongst others. With respect to rice growers in 
Bali, the terraced system of irrigation, and the timetable of rice planting, sluicing, 
and harvesting, is precisely tied to the natural characteristics of the life-history and 
ecology of rice. This has likely been established through trial and error in this tradi-
tional society rather than scientifi c agri-wisdom. The Balinese codify their knowledge 
of rice cultivation as the divine revelation of the goddess of rice and fertility, Dewi Sri, 
and structure their social and agricultural practices around her authority. When some 
aspect of rice cultivation is needed the appropriate procedure is established by con-
sulting the religious practices required as homage to maintain Dewi Sri’s benefi cence. 
Thus, what a Balinese sees as the signifi cance of a particular stage in the life-cycle of 
rice is very different from what a modern agricultural scientist sees. Their respec-
tive Umwelts accord different meanings, or affordances, to the objects and events of their 
Umwelts. Yet, at the same time, both these different world views and their associated 
language-games rest in the same processes: those that in-form any specifi c background. 
The subsequent cultural education of a novice’s joint attention assures that each symboli-
cally maintained world view is sustainable as a unique social practice.
What we have incidentally reached here is an appreciation of another 
Wittgensteinian insight that is important to our view of doing psychology, and another 
facet of this ‘background’ we keep pointing to. Wittgenstein uses the term ‘grammar’ 
in a quite different way from linguists and schoolteachers. He was not directly con-
cerned with the formal rules of grammar whereby we can say that ‘the cat sat on the 
mat’ is a grammatical sentence whereas ‘the cat sitted on the mat’ is ungrammatical. 
He uses it more in the sense that certain things follow when we categorise words 
in particular ways, because of the way languages beguile us. Consequently, if we 
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12 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
mistakenly regard two words as being in the same category, errors in thinking may 
arise. If we don’t notice our original mistake, we may be puzzled by problems which 
develop as, and only as, a consequence of our ways of thinking. A confusion we make 
in English, for example, is between visible and invisible objects. We say, ‘The dog is 
in the kennel’, or ‘The clock is on the mantelpiece’, and the situations are quite clear 
and straightforward. So when we think about ‘the mind’, we apply the same lines of 
expectations to it as we do to ‘dogs’ and ‘clocks’: it must be somewhere. Thus, we 
tacitly expect all sorts of things to follow from our idea of ‘mind’ grasped in this way, 
That is, we apply the ‘grammars’ of visible objects when we talk about mind in a way 
that takes ‘mind’ as a noun. ‘Clocks’ and ‘dogs’ are located somewhere, hence so must 
‘minds’ be; ‘clocks’ and ‘dogs’ do things – tick and bark – and thus so must minds do 
things – they think. This is another aspect of this ‘background’. We can all, as native 
English speakers, enter the conventional language game around the mind (and even 
build a science to study it) without question, and be held to be making sense by oth-
ers when we do this. We do not in everyday life question whether a mind is in anyway 
similar to a dog or a clock. 
Neither, in fact, do we ever stop and question whether dogs or clocks are things 
that are obviously given to our thinking as distinct from what they do. They are cer-
tainly not given to our perception in that way. A dog doing what makes it an animal 
is something for a sheep to run away from: a dead dog is a different thing altogether 
in a sheep’s Umwelt, something that can be ignored because it is now obviously not a 
shape doing doggy things. And without a theory of dogs, sheep can, without refl ec-
tion, act very differently in these two situations. In this way we can understand how 
symbols can mediate very different human Umwelts. Lee (1950), for example, pro-
vides an example here from her fi eldwork with the people of the Trobriand Islands. 
These people cultivate yams, and thus have a concept that, on fi rst sight, appears to 
equate with our understanding of a gardener. But when Lee explored their notion, 
she found it was slightly different from ours. In English, one can be a good or bad gar-
dener: the same ‘thing’ but with different properties. In the Trobriand scheme, what 
we see as different properties of the same category are for them conceptually different 
things altogether: someonewho can grow yams is one thing; someone who can’t is in 
a different ‘thing’ category, a different kind of person. To regard someone as a bad gar-
dener in Trobriand would be a contradiction in terms. How to come ‘see’ the world 
in these different ways is what developmental psychology must work to understand. 
A central resource for doing this is the work of the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky.
VYGOTSKY ON THE SOCIAL 
DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTIONAL SKILL 
Vygotsky and Luria (1993) characterise infant attention as involuntary: it is ‘captured’ 
by ‘strong’ stimuli. These can be external, such that a bright light, a loud noise, or 
a human face can capture the infant’s attention. ‘Internal’ stimuli also infl uence 
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 13
 attention by narrowing down what external events can capture attention at any par-
ticular moment: 
Even in the youngest child, the state of hunger elicits a number of specifi c reactions. 
Instead of a non-differentiated state, that is, the state between sleeping and vigilance, 
some coordinated movements appear: a child reaches for his mother’s breast, all the 
peripheral movements recede into the background, all the child’s behavior organizes itself 
in accordance with this dominant stimulus . . . This type of attention is characterized by its 
non-intentional, non-volitional character . . . any strong and sudden stimulus immediately 
attracts the child’s attention and reconstructs his behavior.
(Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, p. 187)
The task in development is fi rstly to fi nd ways of organising the direction of atten-
tion so that it can be sustained without continuous disruption from these ‘strong’ 
stimuli. Secondly, the task is to develop planning skills that can be exercised ‘inter-
nally’ so as to maintain a hold over attention, not so that it can just be held to ‘the task 
at hand’, but also to ‘the task in mind’. Vygotsky’s claim is that ‘natural forms of atten-
tion cannot satisfy this condition and it is evident that alongside these forms there have 
to develop some other mechanisms. Artifi cial, voluntary, ‘cultural’ attention must 
emerge and is the most necessary condition for any work’ (1993: pp. 187–8). 
Vygotsky characterises the ‘education of attention’2 as beginning with its ‘natu-
ral’ propensities, becoming a ‘cultural operation’, and fi nally incorporating ‘specifi c 
cultural devices’ that lead to the reconstruction and regulation of the child’s given 
psychological functions. The general problem as framed by Vygotsky is this:
The central characteristic of elementary functions is that they are totally and directly 
determined by stimulation from the environment. For higher functions, the central 
feature is self-generated stimulation, that is, the creation and use of artifi cial stimuli 
which become the immediate causes of behavior (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 39).
The general character of Vygotsky’s solution is this: ‘The inclusion of a sign in 
one or other behavioral process . . . reforms the whole structure of the psychological 
operation as the inclusion of a tool reforms the whole structure of a labor operation’ 
(Vygotsky, 1982, p. 103; cited by van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991, p. 220).
A specifi c claim is that all people possess the same ‘lower’, or ‘natural’, or ‘ele-
mentary’ psychological processes. But, depending on the degree of elaboration of the 
2 Some might object to our using Gibson’s phrase in the context of Vygotsky’s thesis. Gibson’s is an account of 
direct perception whereas Vygotsky’s is of indirect or mediated perception. There are certainly diffi culties here 
(see, for example, Noble, 1993 and Good, 2007 for detailed discussions). But, there is a remarkable, underly-
ing compatibility in their general styles of approach to psychological questions that is obscured if we adopt a 
purist stance. We see von Uexküll’s insight – that ‘every action . . . that consists of perception and operation 
imprints its meaning on the meaningless object’ (above, von Uexküll, 1982 [1940], p. 31) – as a way of link-
ing the two approaches. That is, objects can be jointly worked up to have social ‘affordances’. This said, we 
recognise that ‘the successful adoption of an ecological approach will require a thorough-going conceptual 
retooling and not just an acceptance of the utility of the notion of affordance or of direct perception’ (Good, 
2007, p. 286). For example, Vygotsky, given his intellectual situation, uses the notion of ‘stimuli’ in his account: 
stimuli do not have a place in Gibson’s thinking. While we are pointing here towards such a retooling, a more 
thorough treatment than we can include is needed.
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14 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
various symbol systems used in different cultures, people could vary widely in their 
mental functioning, in their ‘higher’, or ‘instrumental’, or ‘cultural’ psychological proc-
esses. The ontological claim that results from Vygotsky’s analysis of ‘human nature’ is 
that: ‘The origin of all, specifi cally human, higher psychological processes, therefore, 
cannot be found in the mind or brain of an individual person but rather should be 
sought in the social ‘extracerebral’ sign systems a culture provides’ (ibid: 222). 
The fi rst stage in this process of ‘educating attention’ is introducing cultural organ-
isers into the child’s natural Umwelt via gesture and speech:
At fi rst, a child takes in the picture of his surroundings in a diffuse manner; however, his mother 
only has to point out some object and name it in order for that object to stand out from its 
surroundings precisely in the way the mother pointed it out and in order that the child turn 
his attention particularly to it. For the fi rst time, the process of attention begins to function 
as a cultural operation. . . . Attention becomes a real function only when the child himself 
masters the means of creating the additional stimuli that focus his attention on individual 
components of a situation and that eliminate everything else from the background.
(Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, p. 189)
The crucial point that Vygotsky pursues is how, after mastering techniques for 
manipulating the environment, ‘the child at a certain moment begins to organ-
ise his psychological processes with the help of these manipulations. How does 
this complicated cultural activity of attention proceed?’ (ibid). Vygotsky essays his 
answer via a study conducted by Leontiev (see, for example, Leontiev, 1981) with 
8-9 year old children.
The problem the children were confronted with requires a deal of concentrated 
attention. The structure of the study was designed to provide insights into how the 
children accomplished this. First, the children were confronted with a specifi c and con-
voluted task. They were asked a set of questions, some of which could be answered 
by naming a colour: ‘Do you go to school?’, ‘What colour is your desk?’, Do you like 
playing games?’, ‘What colour can grass be?’, and so on. Answers were required to 
be given quickly, and with two conditions: a colour cannot be named twice, and two 
colours (for example, black and white) must never be used in an answer. The children 
found this an almost impossible task. They were then given a set of coloured cards 
that they could use as external markers to assist them in sustaining their attention and 
keeping things straight. The reasoning here was that if children tend to be dominated 
by external events, then providing them with cards that could function as external 
holders for their attention, they would fi nd the task easier: ‘external actions help him 
organize his behavior. Operating with the help of the cards,he organizes his inner 
processes in the same way’ (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, p. 190). 
The fi rst approach the children adopted was to lay out all the coloured cards they 
had been given, face up on the table, and take out the two forbidden colours, placing 
them face down on the table. This might seem intuitively sensible, because the array 
of cards now indicates, and keeps in front of them, only those colours that they were 
allowed to use in their answers. However, this approach doesn’t work, because ‘in order 
to achieve success, the child should not remove the forbidden elements from the sphere 
of his attention, but should make the process of attention mediated; he must fi x his attention 
specifi cally on the forbidden elements’ (ibid). That is, since untutored attention has a 
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 15
tendency to be dominated by what is in the environment, removing the wrong answers 
from one’s view is counterproductive to switching attention away from the perceptual 
fi eld. It might then seem that it would make better sense to turn over all the cards but 
the forbidden ones. However, this solution is not very workable either, because the 
child’s attention is focused on a sign for the wrong answer. Further, there is no external 
prop directing attention to an alternative, non-prompted, acceptable answer. 
The children then devised a prompt system that both focused their attention on the 
unacceptable answer and prompted an acceptable one. First, place the forbidden cards 
face up in a row separate from the other cards, closer to oneself. Then when asked 
a question, do not answer directly. Instead, look at the forbidden card to check if the 
answer one was going to give is not allowed, and then select an alternative answer: 
‘What colour can snow be?’ . . . likely answer ‘white’ . . . but white is forbidden, so answer after 
another look; ‘Brown after it turns slushy in the fi elds and people have walked through it: 
forbidding one color causes the inhibition of certain answers; turning to different, new 
situations a new roundabout path of thought’ (op. cit, p. 191). 
To deal with the additional rule of not using the same colour in an answer twice 
children took a colour card they had already named and put it with the forbidden 
cards. Subsequently, the child who became able to solve the problem in this way 
stops using the cards and becomes able to continue with success without the external 
props, where initially he could not. 
How are we to explain this change in behavior? Under close examination we are convinced 
that the process of attention still remained indirect; only instead of externally indirect, it 
became internally indirect. Having learned to use auxiliary tools with the outer material 
cards, the child works out a series of inner auxiliary techniques. Instead of spreading out 
the forbidden cards in front of him, he fi xes in his mind (visually or, even better verbally) on 
these two forbidden colors and then by means of these fi xed colors gives all his answers.3
(Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, p. 192)
Thus, via external support, the child develops a culturally skilled control of his or 
her attention: it becomes mediated through the training process so as to be control-
led by the child’s cultural Umwelt, and not ‘captured’ by the natural environment. 
Whichever way we might explain this transformation, Vygotsky captures here the 
important point that cultural activities have become incorporated into the develop-
ment and contribute directly to its elaboration, transforming the course of psycho-
logical development not by making given abilities more powerful – by augmenting 
them – but by changing them in their structural and functional characteristics as 
mind and cultural environment interact with each other in real time. This interaction 
is itself not one between an individual mind and objects in an inert environment, 
3 It will be clear here how Vygotsky’s cultural resources are leading him into an explanation of what is hap-
pening that is framed somewhat differently from the way we are formulating things here. That is, we want to 
say that the child has established a different relationship between herself and the objects she encounters: these 
have, in von Uexkull’s phrase, a new ‘meaning imprinted onto them’.
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16 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
but with a cultural environment populated by other people who are already doing 
particular things: that is, development occurs in joint actions between people, whose 
minds are embodied, and whose bodies are likewise ‘enminded’.
We turn now to the related issues of how symbols come to mediate human atten-
tion, and how the different structures of socio-cultural interactions contribute to the 
different ways the potentialities of symbol systems come to be actualised as tools for 
thinking with.
SIGNS, SYMBOLS, INTERACTIONS 
AND SKILLS
The literature on early communicative development provides us a view of how the 
general parameters of the social interactions between parents and infants set the 
stage for their development. Infants develop skills in social interaction, but this is not 
always appreciated by researchers. Bates and her colleagues (1979, 1988), for example, 
teased out three independently developing skills as feeding into the emergence of 
symbolic communication: (1) conventional gesturing that implicates objects beyond 
the infant’s body; (2) means-ends analysis; and (3) imitation or rote reproduction 
(with the latter two continuing to underwrite the further elaboration of symbolic 
communication towards the linguistic form). Their orientation was a very individual-
istic one, seeing these skills as cognitive operations for manipulating internal mental 
objects. In our perspective, we can now appreciate these skills as being worked up 
interactively in the social activities of everyday life. 
 Consider the activities of two mothers and their 18-month-old infants described 
below (from Lock et al., 1989). In both cases they are ‘reading’ a book together. The 
point being argued here is that if one wishes to attribute differential ‘skills’ to infants, 
then one should conceive of those skills as socially constructed and not individually 
achieved. These differential abilities are not based solely in individually given ‘cogni-
tive operations’, but are embedded in the perceptual world of interaction itself. From 
one perspective one might choose, for some purposes, to conceive of infants as hav-
ing differential ‘amounts’ of analytic skills which they employ ‘on the world’. From 
another view, it is possible to argue that they have come to live in different socially 
constituted perceptual/conceptual worlds, some of which contain more perceptible 
‘parts’ than others (see below), and that it is as a result of this that they demonstrate 
what can be identifi ed as differential analytic skills. That is, it is not that infants develop 
differently by the exercise and practice of their individual skills. Instead, those skills, 
and the infants’ development itself, are constructed differently via socially constitu-
tive interaction. For example, here are transcripts for two mothers interacting on 
separate occasions with their 18-month infants while using the same book:
It’s a hen. 
There’s a beak. And two feet. 
And there’s a hen with lots of little chicks. 
AQ2
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 17
There’s a tree. And how many leaves have you got on the tree? 
One, two, three . . . sixteen leaves and sixteen little birds sitting on the branch. 
And look atthese little birds here. 
There are two big ones, and there are two more big ones, and there are two very big ones 
and there’s some little ones and they’ve got, do you see where· their eyes are? Do you? 
Where’s the birdy’s eye? 
Get her eye. 
That’s right. 
And where’s her nose? 
Yes. 
And where’s her mouth? 
Turn over? 
Oh look, what’s that? 
It’s a bird. 
What’s this one? 
It’s an apple. 
Apple. 
That’s right. 
It’s got a leaf . . . see 
That’s the stalk 
What’s that? 
That’s a pretty fl ower 
What’s that one there? 
It’s a butterfl y . . . a butterfl y. 
Notice here the way that the mother directs the infant’s attention to objects, 
their parts and the relationships between them. Look at the hen, look it has separa-
ble parts; trees have leaves, and each one can be counted in relation to the others; 
apples have leaves and stalks. Things go together: hens and chicks; fl owers and 
butterfl ies. Things vary in relation to abstract standards: they can be big, very big, 
little or pretty.
This emphasis on actively analysing wholes into their constituent parts, and then 
attending to the relationship between those parts and the ways in which they might 
be recombined into new wholes is almost entirely absent in this next example:
What’s that one? 
Yeah, chickens. 
Oh look, ducks. 
And a birdie, a birdie in a tree. 
There’s another birdie. 
See the other bird there, Kate. 
Hey look, butterfl y and fl owers. 
See the fl owers. 
And a bee. 
Look at the bee. 
And a rabbit. 
Hmmm, bunny rabbit. 
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18 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
The amount of time spent looking at the same page is much shorter than in the 
previous episode. There is little sustained joint attention focused on any particular 
object. While there is some conjunction of objects going on (‘a birdie in a tree; but-
terfl y and fl owers’), the focus on isolating parts from wholes is missing. This lack is 
more apparent when this mother and infant interact with toys, as is the greater speed 
at which the interaction occurs. There is evidence that infants who are involved in 
these different forms of interaction progress differently into language in terms of the 
styles that Nelson (1973) described (see Lock et al., 1989, for further details). 
Once infants begin to ‘take over’ language from their caretakers, at around the 
age of 18 months, the mother shifts to elaborating on the properties and characteris-
tics of the shared focus of attention, including those beyond the here-and-now. All of 
these accrete further signifi cance to the objects the child perceives. Some examples of 
this, again taken from Lock et al. (1989), are concerned with the relationships that can 
exist between objects, that is, how objects can be regarded as parts of larger activities 
(as refl ected here by just the mother’s speech from particular interactional episodes):
Show it to Teddy. 
Put it on the saucer. 
Put that bug into the bucket. 
Are you going to get the snake to catch this bubble? 
Further, this particular mother juggles objects and contexts in a more sophisti-
cated way than in dealing with pictures in a book, with the result that symbolic play 
is engineered:
Would you like a cup of tea? 
Yes, go on, it’s a nice little cup. 
You have some. (Child pretends to drink) 
Give it to Teddy. 
Go on, give Teddy a drink. (Child holds cup to Teddy’s lips). 
Here she gets the infant not just to put two objects in conjunction within the 
present perceptual world, but in a way which only makes sense through their rela-
tion to something that is not immediately present: the ‘tea’ is imaginary, and must be 
brought in from absent contexts to inform present action. It is quite a complicated 
activity: one object (the cup) is to be related to another (tea), which has to be lifted 
out of absent contexts (and lifted out of absent objects to be put in this one), and then 
both the cup and its imaginary contents have to be regarded as a whole and placed in 
relation to a third, and not just Teddy, but the right part of Teddy – his mouth. This is 
a skill that has been socially constructed, not individually attained.
Such differences appear to persist, as is apparent in Hess and Shipman’s (1965) 
study of interactive problem solving between mothers and their 4-year-olds. Hess and 
Shipman describe the teaching techniques of three mothers who are showing their 
children how to solve a sorting problem. Here, we have reversed the order in which 
Hess and Shipman discuss these mothers, so as you might get a better ‘feel’ for the 
diffi culties facing the child who is being taught to . . . well, work it out, because that 
is what the child has to do. They describe the interaction between the mother and 
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 19
child in a structured teaching situation. The individual differences in the linguistic and 
interactional styles of these mothers can be illustrated by excerpts from transcrip-
tions of tape recordings of the ‘teaching’ situations.
 1. One mother introduces the task to her child as follows:
I’ve got some chairs and cars, do you want to play the game?
Child does not respond. 
Mother continues: O.K. What’s this? 
Child: A wagon? 
Mother: Hm? 
Child: A wagon? 
Mother: This is not a wagon. What’s this?
The conversation continues with this sort of exchange for several 
pages. Here ‘. . . the child is not provided with the essential information 
he needs to solve or to understand the problem. There is clearly some 
impelling on the part of the mother for the child to perform, but the 
child has not been told what to do’ (Hess & Shipman, 1965, pp. 881–2). 
At this point, you will have as much clue as to what the problem is as this 
child demonstrated at the end of the session: zero. 
 2. A second mother’s style offers a little more clarity and precision. She says in 
introducing the same task:
Mother: Now, I’ll take them all off the board; now you put them all back on the 
board. What are these?
Child: A truck.
Mother: All right, just put them right here; put the other one right here; all right, put 
the other one there.
‘This mother relies on non-verbal communication accompanying her commands to 
convey the task to her child; she does not defi ne the task for the child; the child is not 
provided with ideas or information that she can grasp in attempting to solve the problem; 
neither is she told what to expect or what the task is, even in general terms’ (ibid). 
But now we have some grasp of the situation. It has to do with putting 
things somewhere, and we might have a glimmering that different things are to 
be put in different places. But we don’t know what it is about the objects that 
we need to direct our attention to so as to classify them as similar or different.
 3. The [fi nal] mother outlines the task for the child, and gives suffi cient help 
and explanation to permit the child to proceed on her own.
Mother: All right, Susan, this board is the place where we put the little toys; fi rst of 
all you’re supposed to learn how to place them according to color. Can you do that? 
The things that are all the same color you put in one section; in the second section 
you put another group of colors, and in the third section you put the last group of 
colors. Can you do that? Or would you like to see me do it fi rst?
Child: I want to do it.
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20 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
 This mother has given explicit information about the task and what is 
expected of the child; she has offered support and help of various kinds; and 
she has made it clear that she expectsthe child to perform. The child is able to 
use what she has heard to mediate her attention, see the implications of each 
separate toy as to what actions are entailed. She is attending to a very different 
world as compared to the other two children, because the objects that com-
prise it have been interactively constructed to have particular signifi cances for 
her as to what she should do with them.
In a similar study, the mother’s style of teaching was assessed by having her 
teach a child other than her own, while the child’s mode of learning was assessed by 
the experimenter rather than the mother teaching a task to the child. In this study, 
Hartmann and Haavind (1981) found a strong relationship between maternal teach-
ing style and child ‘educability’. Not only were children whose mothers presented the 
task to them in an explicit, decomposed style more likely to learn the task, they also 
showed a more ‘interested’ and ‘cooperative’ approach to being taught. Hartmann 
and Haavind claim, then, that what is being measured in such experiments is an endur-
ing style of teaching on the mother’s part, a characteristic mode of action which 
she exhibits over long periods of time. Further, children develop similarly enduring 
‘traits’ in their approaches to learning and problem-solving situations, because they 
are being orientated to attend to the world in particular ways – it is to the ways in 
which they are taught how to attend to events occurring around them that we would 
now like to turn.
THE DEVELOPMENTAL 
TRANSFORMATION OF ATTENTION 
BY CULTURE
The Russian psychologist of the 1920s and 1930s, Lev Vygotsky, provides one of the 
most exciting accounts of how attention is educated in the course of social interac-
tion. As Vygotsky (1966, pp. 11–12) saw it: 
Traditional views of the development of the higher mental functions are erroneous and 
one-sided primarily and mainly because they are unable to see facts as facts of historical 
development, regard them as natural processes and formations, confuse them and fail to 
differentiate the organic from the cultural, the natural from the historical, the biological 
from the social in the child’s mental development, in a word – these views of the nature of 
the phenomena are incorrect. 
It is a part of Vygotsky’s genius that he was able to devise experimental situa-
tions that reveal how culture adds itself into natural developmental processes so as to 
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 21
transform them, without losing their nature by separating them from the surrounding 
situations into which they are relationally interwoven.
Throughout his whole career, Vygotsky (1978, 1986, 1987)4 remarked on the dif-
ferences between the analysis of a whole into its separate elements, and what he calls 
‘unit analysis’, the difference between seeing a whole as made up of independent, 
externally inter-related parts all ‘glued’ or ‘screwed’ together by some means irrele-
vant to the nature of the whole, and a whole made up of internally inter-related parts 
that, as it comes into being, develops from a simple inner articulation into one with 
a much more complex inner articulation. In making this most important distinction, 
Vygotsky (1987, pp. 45–46; our emphases) noted that:
 The fi rst of these forms of analysis begins with the decomposition of the complex mental 
whole into its elements . . . [which are] products are of a different nature than the whole 
from which they are derived . . . Since it results in products that have lost the characteristics 
of the whole, this process is not a form of analysis in the true sense of the word. At any rate, it 
is not ‘analysis’ vis a vis the problem to which it was meant to be applied . . . Because it causes 
the researcher to ignore the unifi ed and integral nature of the process being studied, this 
form of analysis leads to a profound delusion. The internal relationships of the unifi ed 
whole are replaced with external mechanical relationships between . . . heterogeneous 
processes.
Indeed, in doing this – again in criticism of traditional forms of analysis (which sepa-
rate intrinsically interwoven functions from each other) – he commented (Vygotsky, 
1966) that such an approach ‘forgets that ‘‘man also reacts on nature, changing it and 
creating new conditions of existence for himself ’’ ’ (p. 21, quoting Engels). 
In this way, we can change and develop the surroundings within which we grow 
up, and refl exively these changes in our surroundings change us as we spontane-
ously respond to them. This theme is central (and in our view, quite revolutionary) 
in both Vygotsky’s (and Wittgenstein’s) work. Rather than the simple quantita-
tive accumulation of yet more information, they see our human development as a 
 matter of ‘making new connections’, of devising ‘new relations’ between ourselves 
and our surroundings. These achievements permit us to arrive at new ways of 
relating aspects of ourselves within ourselves. Another implication is that grow-
ing within ‘background’ surroundings developed by our predecessors, we grow 
up as beings with a consciousness, at least in some degree, structured differently 
from theirs.
4 Here, we will quote from Minick’s (1987) translation, as this issue is spelt out there in much more detail. 
Indeed, with regard to the three translations of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, or Thinking and Speech, we 
will mostly quote from Kozulin’s 1986 translation – it being now perhaps the most accessible to everyone. But 
we will quote from the other translations when we think (for our purposes) the phrasing is more evocative. 
(Given Vygotsky’s account of the meaning and the sense of words, he would have much to say about the effect 
of different translations on our actual, practical responses to his written words.) 
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22 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Vygotsky (1986, pp. 1–2) described the nature of development thus, again in criti-
cism of traditional approaches: 
The unity of consciousness and the interrelation of all psychological functions were, it is true, 
accepted by all; the single functions were assumed to operate inseparably, in an uninterrupted 
connection with one another. But this unity of consciousness was usually taken as a postulate, 
rather than a subject of study . . . It was taken for granted that the relation between two given 
functions never varied; that perception, for example, was always connected in an ideal way 
with attention, memory with perceptions, thought with memory . . . [thus] the development 
of consciousness was seen as determined by the autonomous development of the single 
functions. Yet all that is known about psychic development indicates that its very essence 
lies in the change of the interfunctional structure of consciousness.
In other words, higher mental functions are arrived at in our being able to ‘instruct’ 
ourselves in managing to ‘orchestrate’ a set of lower, essentially animal functions, 
into a complex sequence.
One thing that is clear is that, with their symbolic abilities, developing children are 
naturally gifted at ‘making connections’. Symbolic play comes in around 18-months 
old. A short piece of wood can be dragged across the head as a ‘pretend’ comb’; or 
held to ear and mouth to become a pretend telephone (a word or object means what 
it is used for – Wittgenstein). Children (and adults) are good at ‘making connections’ 
from an early age. However, this skill is undisciplined in its natural state: attention is 
untutored and easily wanders. While it does not wander randomly, it is unable to sus-
tain consistency across successive decisionpoints as to what abstracted feature should 
be used as the focus of attention.
Vygotsky (1962, pp. 52–81) describes the changes that occur developmentally in 
the sustaining of attention. One of these stages he calls ‘chain complexes’. The child, 
when faced with a task of sorting items into groups, so as they ‘go together’, uses 
one feature – size, for example – so that a large red block is placed with a large yellow 
block, but then forgets the relation that unites choice one and choice two, and for the 
third item adds a small yellow block. Thus the chain: item one relates to two; two 
relates to selection three; but there is no consistent link between one and three. What 
is more interesting in the present context is not the particular sequence of the stages, 
but the ways in which shifts in the ability to sustain attention are assisted.
 First, it is not an inherently individual developmental process. The skill is oft times 
practiced socially, where someone who has the skill exercises it with the child to scaf-
fold their attention: ‘No, not that one; look, it’s another big one that you want’. The 
words and gestures of another prompt the exercise, educating it as sustainable, and 
clarifying its focus. Attention is socially and linguistically mediated.
Second, as the child becomes able to pursue problems with more independence, 
both his or her own language and ‘mnemo-technic’ skills are deployed so as to medi-
ate the maintenance of attention. One of the clearest portrayals of how this works 
is described by Vygotsky (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, pp. 206–13) in the context of a 
response task. The task used is structurally simple. The child is given a toy piano, 
and has to learn which key to press when presented with a picture: ‘an axe, an apple, 
a letter, a chair, and so forth; in reaction to the fi rst one he is supposed to press one 
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THE SOCIAL NATURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 23
key on [the] children’s piano toy, to another a second key, then the next one, and so 
forth’ (1993, p. 208). With eight associations to memorise, then the task is not easy 
for a young child. In fact, 5- to 6-year-olds were unable to accomplish it. Further, they 
failed even if given ‘props’, such as a second series of pictures that could serve as 
prompts to the correct key by placing the pictures next to the appropriate key – for 
the axe a picture of a boy cutting wood, for the apple a pear, and so on.
The phase in which the child is found may be characterized as the phase of natural forms 
of behavior . . . Its basic feature is that in any situation, the child adapts exclusively by means 
of those natural functions that he possesses. . . . It will in no way occur to him that the 
proposed auxiliary cards can really play some role . . . that it is possible to use them as a 
means to solve the proposed task, that it is possible to use them as a means to execute 
a psychological operation. . . . In order to develop further, the child must pass from this 
natural stage to a more complex [one]: He must expand his natural abilities; once he has 
learned to use tools, he should pass from the natural stage to the cultural one.
(Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, p. 208–9)
Six- to seven-year-olds faced with this task readily adopt the auxiliary pictures, 
but do so very haphazardly and with little understanding of how to use them effi -
ciently, placing any picture by a key: ‘having placed some marker, he no longer wor-
ries about remembering; he is naively convinced that ‘the marker will remember for 
him’ (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, p. 209). The child still does not know the meaning of 
these external devices. This understanding begins to emerge when simple connec-
tions can be handled, so the key for the apple can be remembered via the picture 
of a pear ‘because they both taste good’. For 9- to 10-year-olds the connections fi rst 
become more ingenious: the key for ‘shovel’ can be remembered by placing a picture 
of chicks next to it ‘because they dig with their nose, like a shovel’; the key for ‘night’ 
by a rubber tube ‘because it’s dark in the tube, like at night’. Second, the connections 
can be easily broken and reformed for the next series of presentations: the rubber 
tube prompts for a picture of smoke, because, like a pipe, ‘smoke can come out of it’.
Later, the child begins another phase of development in which, after using the signs 
a number of times during the experiment, he or she stops using them. Vygotsky’s 
explanation of what is happening at this point has an intuitive appeal: ‘What he did 
earlier with the help of external signs, he now begins to do with the help of inner 
signs that replace for him entirely those external signs that he learned’ (op. cit, p. 212). 
In the approach we are outlining here, we would frame it that the child has become 
able to control his or her attention. By this phase, attention has been educated to 
focus on the different meanings that the child is now presented with by the objects he 
or she interacts with. We reject the interpretation that this transformation rests in the 
development of mental representations. Rhetorically, however, Vygotsky’s account of 
development captures its important characteristic:
In this way, the nervous psychological processes, while developing and transforming, begin 
to build according to an entirely new system. From a natural process, they are transformed 
into complex ones, formed as a result of cultural infl uence and the effect of a series of 
conditions, fi rst of all, as a result of active interaction with the environment.
(ibid.)
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24 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Thus, as we noted above, we are endowed biologically with memorial capaci-
ties, but as a human infant grows, it is not just a matter of them being simply able 
to remember more things, along with a larger number of connections between 
them. Instead, as the child is ‘instructed’ in the use of various, culturally invented, 
mediational means, and enabled, in the development of many various different 
interfunctional relations between them, to develop capacities in which mediated and 
nonmediated functions are interwoven. Indeed, Vygotsky claims, the interfunctional 
relations involved in learning mediated remembering reverse their direction:
For the young child, to think means to recall; but for the adolescent, to recall means to think. 
Her memory is so ‘logicalized’ that remembering is reduced to establishing and fi nding 
logical relations; recognizing consists in discovering that element which the task indicates 
has to be found . . . When a human being ties a knot in her handkerchief as a reminder, 
she is, in essence, constructing the process of memorizing by forcing an external object 
to remind her of something; she transforms remembering into an external activity . . . In 
the elementary form something is remembered; in the higher form humans remember 
something. In the fi rst case a temporary link is formed owing to the simultaneous 
occurrence of two stimuli that affect the organism; in the second case humans personally 
create a temporary link through the artifi cial combination of stimuli.
(Vygotsky, 1978, p. 51)
It is a matter, to repeat, not of accumulating a greater amount of information, but 
of learning many different ways, not only of how to interrelate what they already 
know, but of how to interrelate or orient themselves differently to their surroundings 
in acquiring new forms of information not previously gathered. 
CONCLUSIONS 
Above, then, we have sought to bring into prominence the background to developmen-
tal studies in, in fact, two quite major ways: 
 1. Primarily, as the